THE MOORS, THE MERRIER

Spotlight

We are intimate with the work of Jane Austen through countless iterations in film and on television. We well know those high-waisted dresses and opening lines: "It is a truth universally acknowledged... " But does anyone quote the first line of Jane Eyre: "There was no possibility of taking a walk that day"? Charlotte Bronte's towering masterpiece of 1847 reads like a cold-eyed, fate-tossed, early-Victorian descendant of Austen's—a gothic moon to her midday sun. This month brings forth a new film adaptation of Bronte's book, directed by 33-year-old Caryjoji Fukunaga. Deeply faithful to the novel, this Eyre is scaled to the harsh grandeur of the moors. And the faces, like those of Tamzin Merchant and Holliday Grainger as the sisters Mary and Diana Rivers, are scrubbed as clean as sea glass. Mia Wasikowska, who was Alice in Tim Burton's recent Alice in Wonderland, plays Jane with suspended emotion. Wearing her hair parted down the middle, she looks strikingly like the unflinching poet Emily Dickinson, who was 16 when Jane Eyre was published, just about the age Jane is when she arrives at Thornfield Hall, the home of Edward Rochester. He is played by Michael Fassbender, who may be too handsome for Rochester but nonetheless captures the despair inside his baiting charm, his hawk-like stare. Edward's dark brow, Jane's unblinking gaze—let the swoons begin.

LAURA JACOBS